A tweet from Johan Andersson from this past summer offers a revelation not noted here at the time, as the tweet seems to confirm rumors from 2007 that the Frostbite 2.0 engine that will power the upcoming Battlefield 3 will not support Windows XP, saying: "Frostbite 2 is primarily developed for DX11. XP & DX9 is _not_ supported, 64-bit OS is recommended. Lots of time to upgrade if you haven't!" The thread about this on the Electronic Arts Forums also has comments noting this was revealed already, and there are slides in DICE's SIGGRAPH 2010 presentation indicating Frostbite 2.0 will only support DirectX 10 and DirectX 11. Thanks James via BF3Blog.

There was a time not long ago when PC gamers *wanted* developers to push the envelope. Year after year of console ports and suddenly everyone is concerned not how well a new game will look and run but how well the ten-year-old one will? How fucking depressing.

There was a time when games were designed exclusively for hardcore PC gamers as well. That time is long past.

Simply put, the difference between DX8 and DX9 was substantial. DX9 could handle visual effects that DX8 could not and these effects were fairly significant. The difference between DX9 and DX10/11 is far less noticeable. In most cases, DX10/11 does the same effects as DX9, only more efficiently. Even with this improved efficiency, running in DX10/11 does not offer noticeably improved framerates so why should gamers care?

In order for MS to convince gamers that it's worth upgrading to DX10/11, DX10/11 games need to be developed that make players go "Wow! I've never seen anything like that with DX9! DX9 games look so outdated now!" Unfortunately, that has yet to occur.